May 7, 2009
Graduate student Aaron Sterling's paper on "Distributed Agreement in Tile Self-Assembly" won the Best Student Paper Award at the Fifteenth International Meeting on DNA Computing and Molecular Programming. This is one of a sequence of papers in which Sterling, a Ph.D. student working with Professor Jack Lutz, is forging connections between the theory of distributed computing and the theory of nanoscale self-assembly. This award pays the bulk of Sterling's travel expenses for presenting his paper at the June, 2009 conference.